Wednesday, January 18, 2006

The unalloyed joy that is Wednesday

It's four hours until dinner and I can't wait to eat. I've got a new cookbook by Madhur Jaffrey which is I think Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian and today I made my first meal out of it: Moroccan chick pea stew with 6 vegetables. It took me actually two days of cooking because of the chick peas - you have to soak them first which I forgot to do so had to do the way where you boil them and let them sit for an hour. Then you cook them for another hour or so but I used my pressure cooker (which I adore) to make it only 20 minutes. So then you chop up an onion, waxy potatoes, a sweet potato, carrots, zucchini and parsley and cilantro and season it with turmeric, ginger powder, cumin and cayenne and cook it in stages as you add the veggies. Oh my god. You serve it on couscous. I tried it at lunch and it is fantastic fantastic. I didn't miss the meat at all. Sydney tried it, however, and said, "You know what would be good in this? Chicken."

So I'm not vegetarian but I'm trying to cut back on meat since my cholesterol is borderline high. Zach is thrilled about this. I hope he likes the stew tonight though, and I think he will. I used whole wheat couscous and it's really hearty and fulfilling with the veggies. Yum.

I also have four tiny oranges for my snack. Which is where I got the title for this blog. They aren't much bigger than a quarter and they peel really easily. You can just pop the whole orange in your mouth at once but I like to eat them teeny section by teeny section because they're so fucking cute. The sections aren't any bigger than your pinky fingernail really. There's hardly any pith and stringy stuff which I hate about big oranges. I guess these are technically tangerines now that I think about it. They have a name which I can't think of but it's Japanese-y sounding and starts with a K. I prefer to call them tiny oranges.